Competing Reflexive Models of Regional Speech in Northern Ohio

Abstract

Campbell-Kibler (2012) argued that the “northern” or Cleveland accent has been developing as a register (Agha 2003, 2007) in Ohio, primarily positioned as an unstigmatized and idiosyncratic form of linguistic difference from an imagined central Ohio norm. The current study examines northern Ohioans’ orientation to this construct within a larger understanding of their sociolinguistic imagining of Ohio. Northerners are found to share many language ideologies with other Ohioans, including a focus on north-to-south variation, an emphasis on rural versus urban language difference, and a belief in the local existence of unaccented, educated, normative speech. They differ from other Ohioans in sometimes conceptualizing urban speech as standard, failing to mark central Ohio as a distinct region, and subdividing the northeast (their own region) in a Cleveland-centered small region and a larger northeast corner of the state. Most importantly, they differ from central Ohioans in their treatment of the linguistic difference between central and northern Ohio, i.e., the Inland North/Midland dialect boundary (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). Forty-two percent of northerners and 52 percent of others fail to construct a perceptual boundary between central and northeast Ohio, while 27 percent and 48 percent respectively indicate the north as the divergent speech area. Northerners differ, however, in having a third group (31 percent), who position their own speech as normative and the central Ohio speech as marked, counter to the discourses of central Ohioans. These results support Agha’s (2007) point that individuals’ stakes in particular reflexive models are a key influence on models’ circulation and further show the importance of “unremarkable” as a context-bound and often valuable sociolinguistic meaning, rather than a lack of meaning.